FRANCE BANS GMO MAIZE WITH MORE TO COME(PERHAPS)

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Joseph P. Farrell • Filed Under: Alchemy •

While this article is a bit dated by the time this blog has been scheduled, it is nonetheless significant and worth bringing to your attention. A few days ago I composed a blog about Russia’s state Duma considering a complete ban on GMO products. The article, you’ll recall, was based on a story published by RT(Russia Today), which also indicated two more significant things: (1) Russia intended to conduct longterm scientific evaluation of GMOs, surely bad news to American agribusiness giants like Mon(ster)santo, since they won’t be in a position to buy off Russian scientists (or will they?), and (2) the same article suggested strongly that Russia was considering entry into the agricultural market place selling non-GMO, regular, ordinary, seeds for crops, a move that I have been predicting would inevitably come from one of the BRICSA nations as part of their pushback against the aggressive policies both of the USA and of USA corporations.
But there’s another European nation to watch as well, and it’s France:
French GM-Maise Planting Ban
The caption in the picture at the top of the article says it all, at least as far as the French opposition to GMOs is concerned: “GMOs: Menace to all life.”
But there’s more: note the implications of the first two paragraphs:

“The French government issued a decree Monday forbidding farmers to plant genetically-modified maize in the immediate future while the government drafts a comprehensive law that will attempt to ban the practice nationwide.
“French officials maintain that GM crops constitute a serious environmental risk, despite a senior court striking down two national prohibitions on GM maize (corn) in recent time. GM opponents were also frustrated recently by the European Union, which failed to agree on whether or not to ban a new strand of GM-maize. The lack of consensus makes it more likely that the EU Commission will approve its cultivation.”

In other words, regardless of what corporate pressures may be being brought to bear upon the EU commission, France itself will have none of it. It is is a rebellion that seems to be headed for more widespread European-wide bans:

“… the French Senate began debating more comprehensive domestic legislation on Monday. That law, which is expected to be voted on in April, will seek to make planting of all genetically modified organisms (GMOs) illegal.
“France is also lobbying other European Union countries to sign a letter that would warn the Commission not to approve Pioneer 1507.
“’Those who believe in the value of the EU to its citizens are rightly concerned how this will play out in the upcoming European elections,’ the letter said
“Pioneer 1507, the aforementioned strand of maize that the countries could not decide on, was developed jointly by DuPoint and Dow Chemical and has been the subject of no small amount of public suspicion. The document has already been signed by ministers from Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemborg, Malta, Poland, and Slovenia”

I hope you read that carefully, for France is seeking to transform the issue into a kind of referendum on the structure of the EU itself, via the issue of the healthfulness or lack thereof of GMO crops. It is a clever and I suspect will ultimately be a successful strategy, for as the evidence increasingly grows that GMOs do entail significant health risks, the already pressured EU bureaucrats can hardly afford yet another issue that protrays the whole EU structure and experience as one indifferent to European peoples.
There is also, as I’m sure you’ve all guessed by now, a wider geopolitical and international financial context in which this move must be viewed, and that is the moves by Europe to form its own internet more secure against US electronic eavesdropping, a move that France along with Germany is sponsoring. Since agricultural exports constitute a significant portion of American international foreign trade, this is yet more pushback against the unipolar American vision of world order that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and which has been the principal formative factor in American foreign and financial policy since.